Prof Nguyen Van Tuan from Garvan Institute

Web of Science (WoS) has named 10 establishments in Vietnam leading in number of ISI (articles published in 2015-2018), showing that the total number of ISI articles has been increasing year on year.

This is good news for Vietnam’s science and education as it shows changes in Vietnam universities’ awareness of the importance of international publications.

Some universities have promised to award tens to hundreds of million of dong to each ISI/Scopus internationally published article.

The leading prestigious universities which receive big investments from the State turn out to have research productivity worse than newly established private schools such as Ton Duc Thang, Duy Tan and Le Quy Don. 

Of the top 10 of ISI publishers listed by WoS, the Vietnam Academy of Science & Technology is the only unit which is not a university education establishment. 

The second position belongs to Ton Duc Thang University, while the third and fourth positions belong to Hanoi and HCMC National Universities. 

Duy Tan University, a private university, ranks sixth with 1,000 articles published on ISI and 46 on Scopus in the last five years.

According to Prof Nguyen Van Tuan from Garvan Institute, five years ago, the number of scientific articles from Vietnam by WoS list was about 2,500 per year, but the number now is over 4000.

That is good news, commented Tuan, but the bad news is that the domestic content in international publications has not increased. 

It is estimated that about 80 percent of scientific articles from Vietnam, especially in experimental fields, are co-hosted with foreign colleagues. The proportion has remained unchanged over the last 25 years.

Tuan said that Vietnam has made a big leap in recent years in scientific research, while other countries have made even more significant progress in the field. 

Malaysia’s scientific publications, for example, have exceeded Thailand’s and they are nearly equal to Singapore’s. As such, Vietnam still lags behind other regional countries. The number of Vietnam’s research works with high quality and influence remains modest.

Vietnamese scientists have some worthy scientific research works published in prestigious journals including one of Dr Pham Hoang Hiep in math and research work on infertility by a group of Vietnamese doctors.

However, Tuan said it is impossible to make conclusions based on such singular cases. The scientific work on infertility is the result of personal efforts, while it was not funded by any state agency.

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